Criticle News

On Wednesday October 31, 2018 about 8AM until 10:40 AM the CS web server that serves the web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ sites, plus other CS research web servers (truthsayer, theory, whitespace2010, architecture, bugswarm, american, geekonomics, etc) were down or incorrectly pointing to the CSIF web services.

Because this issue was caused by a DNS error, it may take some time for the fix to propagate around the worlds DNS.

This was caused by an error at the campus IT while moving the csiflabs.cs.ucdavis.edu web site to the College of Engineering servers.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact: support@cs.ucdavis.edu

There have been a few social engineering attacks via email that have slipped by our spam firewall and Google's security measures. Be on your guard!

The most common of these phishing attacks com from some trusted entity, such as Campus IT, or from a service used in academia, like Blackboard. The message might say you have a message, or it might say your password is going to expire, anything to get you to click and login with your campus credentials which are then stolen, along with any data associated with that password.

Don't click on links you are unsure of. Do not re-use passwords for multiple services. Use a two-factor authenticator when available.

The Systems Support Group (SSG) highly recommends turning on Google's 2-Step Verification to protect your Google account (Davismail). There are a few ways to authenticate using this service, including a very convenient code sent to your phone via text.

This two-factor authentication is an effective method for countering phishing attacks, as it adds an extra verification layer when logging into sensitive applications. It's a good idea to apply two-factor authentication on a service when you can.